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Five years. In five years you could take a year off from school and still finish college or even complete a majority of grade school. For five years, however, some of us have waited for one of the most highly anticipated massively-multiplayer online games of this year: Star Wars: The Old Republic.

Depending on how much you've followed SWTOR in the news, or if this latest trend has just piqued your interest: there's a lot to learn. In the coming days, I'm going to try and summarize my day-to-day encounters and experiences before writing a review. So be sure to check back here for updates.

Fans of Baldur's Gate, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Mass Effect, and/or Dragon Age will recognize the developer name BioWare attached to Star Wars: The Old Republic. The company has set lofty (read: expensive) goals for itself: A fully voiced game complete with cut scenes. BioWare also hasn't left SWTOR without the company's signature touch for creating involved storylines for each character class, as well as dialogue options and a moral choice system that affects certain outcomes of your game (though it's currently uncertain how much in SWTOR).

Certain components in SWTOR are more or less what gamers have come to expect from MMOs like World of Warcraft. There's a crafting system, dungeons and raids (referred to as Flashpoints and Operations), Player versus Player battlefields, and character advancement options. However, unlike World of Warcraft, you won't be able to do much multitasking while playing SWTOR. There's an incredible amount of involvement between the cut scenes before each mission, and choosing dialogue options that possibly decide the fate of an entire race. This setup is different from most MMOs where you simply click a button to accept or reject a quest and run off to fetch this, kill X amount of that, or deliver this package.